Frame

In substrate dynamics, a frame is the primitive unit: a typed knowledge unit with named slots, instantiated from content rather than drawn from a fixed ontology. A frame can be as small as a sentence-level claim or as large as a whole document, and frames nest — a claim sits inside a section, a section inside a document, the same composition repeating across scales (see fractal-composition).

The slots are what make the structure legible. Each slot is named, and its filler is itself a frame — so a slot is an edge in the graph, and following slots is how composition and traversal work. What the names buy is discursive structure: a slot records the role one frame plays for another — the claim being made, the evidence for it, the objection it has to answer — not merely that two frames are connected. An argument nests the claim it asserts, the examples that ground it, the references behind those, and the objection it must meet:

{
  "id": "arg/long-context-unreliable",
  "type": "argument",
  "content": "Long-context recall isn't reliable enough to depend on yet.",
  "slots": {
    "claim": {
      "type": "claim",
      "content": "Recall accuracy degrades as the context window grows."
    },
    "evidence": [
      {
        "type": "example",
        "content": "On a needle-in-a-haystack test, accuracy fell off past ~32k tokens.",
        "slots": { "reference": "paper:arxiv/2407.01437" }
      }
    ],
    "objection": {
      "type": "rebuttal",
      "content": "Retrieval augmentation recovers most of the accuracy back."
    }
  }
}

Any labeled-property graph can say two nodes are related; the work here is in the slot names saying how — claim, evidence, objection — so the edges carry the shape of the reasoning, not just adjacency. Because a frame carries its type and slots explicitly, the relationship between two frames is legible in their structure, not only in their proximity in embedding space. That is what lets coupling carry a valence — alignment or interference, not just strength — and it is the material a membrane is ultimately drawn over.

Frames and membranes

A membrane is drawn over frames, but it is not quite a frame itself. A frame’s schema is declared — a type and named slots, fixed before it is filled, its edges pointing at specific frames. A membrane has none of that: it is a population held together by coupling, composed by co-activation rather than by named slots. What stands in for its schema is induced — the fingerprint we measure over it: type spread, coupling structure, phase coherence. So the two are commensurable, not identical. The same mechanics and metrics run over both — the legibility we want — but a frame is a composition where a membrane composes. The bridge is crystallization: a membrane that recurs and stabilizes can be collapsed to a point and its schema induced from its population — then matched to an existing frame type, or promoted to a new one in the registry below. Same substance at two phases — declared structure and emergent structure — convertible one direction.

Types

The registry runs to around forty types; a representative few:

The registry is not fixed: in rage-substrate it is a static default set. Either way it is a working vocabulary, not a closed ontology.

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